• IBM 1981-1995 - 15 years
• Microsoft 1995-2009 - 15 years
• Google 2009-

To me it seems like Microsoft is currently in approximately the same position that IBM was in 1994. Back then IBM was top dog on the PC and had been since releasing their micro-computer which they called the PC in 1981. We still refer to PCs and IBM compatible even though our current computers are thousands of times more powerful than a PC and are not compatible with anything IBM produce. IBM actually outsourced their operating system supply to a small insignificant company called Microsoft because Digital Research who they wanted to supply the operating system refused to talk to them. DOS was actually a temporary measure as was the original PC as Intel hadn’t quite got their 32 bit chip working properly yet. The plan was to migrate everyone onto AT computers running OS/2 as soon as possible but the popularity of the PC and XT computers made that impossible.

Microsoft released the OS/2 operating system in 1987 but few were interested even though it could run multiple programs at the same time and had a graphical interface. Still there wasn’t much interest in graphical interfaces for DOS back then either and GEM, Deskview, Topview, Windows etc were basically ignored. Even combining Windows and Topview (IBM’s GUI) together and releasing them as Windows 2 was ignored.

Microsoft continued to work on OS/2 continued right up to when IBM and Microsoft parted company in 1989. Each then continued to work on it separately since both had rights to the code. Then Microsoft released Windows 3.0 and then 3.1 and graphical interfaces then became popular. So much so that Microsoft renamed their version 2 of OS/2 to Windows NT 3.1 to try to cash in on its popularity and switch people over to a proper operating system. The attempt was not successful and IBM’s OS/2 was starting to gain in popularity.

In August of 1995 Microsoft released a new version of the primitive DOS operating system with a fancy GUI tacked on with an over the top launch. The product was 10 years behind NT3.1 and OS/2v2 in what it could do but Microsoft didn’t care, all they wanted to do was steal the top spot from IBM and the launch DOS 7 with Windows 4 tacked on with the combined product being renamed Windows 95 achieved that.

The operating system today is almost irrelevant with most things now being able to be done via the web. Microsoft have started to make marketing errors with the launch of their latest operating system Windows Vista being overly bloated and not able to run many of the applications that people need. I know of many people who have bought new computers with Vista on them who have then had to go and buy Windows XP and reformat the whole computer just to get it to run their software (maybe this is a deliberate marketing ploy by Microsoft to get people to buy two operating systems instead of one but it is alienating lots of people).

At this point we are just waiting for Google who is now Microsoft’s obvious successor to the top spot to launch their Microsoft killer. I expect that to appear some time in the next two years and then Microsoft will be another minor player in the market.

There is no way that Microsoft can recover enough ground against Google to make any difference. The playing field is now the internet and Microsoft is so far behind Google that they have no way whatever of catching them. The only way that they might have a chance would be if they bought up every other search engine on the planet with the exception of Google and the dying Yahoo and hope that by combining the best features of all of them that they could then fix MSN to work properly as a search engine in what would then be a duopoly.

Tags: 32 bit chip, bit chip, Google, goole, GUI, ibm, Intel, microsoft, operating system, operating systems, Search Engine, top PC company, Yahoo